The epic story of how an all-male image of divinity begot artificial life at its genesis.
The Foundational Phallus-y of Western Civilization
“Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer
Today, our starting place is behind and beneath, for in the true wisdom of Mother Nature, it is necessary to unearth a problem at its root. And in order to do so, we must begin our story at its genesis.
As remote as religion may be from the average modern life, the foundation of our Western society was fundamentally built upon religious principles. Just like the foundation of a building, the substructure may no longer be visible above the surface; however its form still determines the shape, boundaries, strengths, heights, and limitations of the construction that it supports.
The Genesis myth can be thought of as a profoundly influential and largely foundational myth for Western society, and it contains within it certain attitudes, assumptions, messages, and omissions that have shaped our resulting society built upon it. Creation myths also map out in metaphoric form the initiatory rites of passage for a civilization¹ — i.e., they symbolically describe the psychological transition from childhood dependency into adult autonomy and mature participation within that societal group.
With this in mind, let us now dig into the metaphoric underground of our own Genesis myth together and unearth a deeper look at the symbolical messages to us all that it contains:
An expectation of perpetual obedience and subservience to hierarchical, power-based, paternalistic oversight within a strictly delineated and tightly controlled territory
A fear-based admonition to never listen to the voice of your own intuition that alerts you to reality and a corresponding demonization of that inner voice of truth (serpent)
An idealisation of childlike naivety that glorifies remaining “innocent” to knowing when you are vulnerably exposed (naked)
A directive to dominate Mother Earth² and utilise her for your own personal benefit in whatever way that you wish
A relegation of woman to the role of servile helper and appendage-like, non-being who deserves to suffer brutally during childbirth
A revelation that those who speak the truth and expose systemic lies will be mislabeled “evil” by the very system that has a vested interest in keeping everyone “unaware”
A normalisation of codependency within romantic relationship, where two partners “cling” to one another in a stifling attempt to complete themselves externally via the other (shared rib)
A message to subsume your own true inner authority for the entirety of your adult life and falsely accept all authority as coming from “outside” of yourself
A controlling dictate to never taste the fruits of real knowledge for yourself and to never learn how to wisely see through and discern true “good” from “evil” for yourself
The Genesis myth describes a state of completely arrested development in child psychology as the divinely mandated ideal to aspire to.³ One must wonder what it means for our entire Western civilization and for our personal lives that our mythic foundation fallaciously relegates us to a lifetime of un-initiation, arrested development, and by extension, inevitable exploitation.
Right about now you might be asking yourself the question, “Was it always this way?” And the short answer to that question is: Hell no. On our epic biblical journey today, let us now go even further back in time and dig deeper to unearth what has been buried away underneath this ideologically fragile but far-reaching biblical substructure.
In the Beginning: A Deeper Look at our Genesis
“The first 30,000 years of Homo sapiens’ existence was dominated by a celebration of female processes: of the mysteries of menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth; of the analogous abundance of the earth; of the seasonal movement of animals and the cycles of time in the Great Round of the Mother…it confirms what too many people do not want to know, that the first ‘God’ was female.” — Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo
In the beginning, back in time before our biblical family of two dads in the sky and their miraculous son that bleeds and doesn’t die, lies the long-forgotten buried traces of our Missing Mother. Her conspicuous absence from the biblical trinity — an arguably essential figure in a strictly heterosexual ideology — is, of course, a curious anomaly.⁴ But as we will see, her ancient image was omitted intentionally and her vestiges were buried deliberately,⁵ conveniently after her religion was stolen completely. So in order to unearth her hidden tracks, we must travel back before our all-male biblical family to the very genesis of humanity, and examine what our Missing Mother’s covered traces can reveal to us on our epic journey today.
In ancient beliefs, the ability to give birth to life was considered divine since the earliest beginnings of humankind.⁶ Naturally, the original deity was imaged as a Great Mother Goddess, who symbolised the life-creating powers of nature, the sacredness of the earth, and the womb-like circle that unified all diverse life as valuable manifestations of her creativity.⁷ By extension, the birthing, bleeding processes of the female womb were also sacred and were associated with the periodic moon itself,⁸ which “dies” each month at the dark moon and “rises again” anew on the third day.
This natural Life-Death-Life cycle⁹ — an observable reality of Mother Earth's seasonal cycles of growth, death, and rebirth of plant life — was also depicted as dying/rising vegetation gods throughout the whole history of ancient mythology.¹⁰ These gods were the fruitful children and lovers of the Mother Goddess and would perennially “rise again” in the spring to represent the celebrated return of crops and vegetation.
Does any of our Missing Mother’s story sound strikingly familiar to you yet?
Well hold on, there’s more!
Our Missing Mother also had a Neolithic Garden, complete with her Sacred Tree and her primordial companion of Wise Serpent — whose skin-shedding, underground nature communicated not “evil” at all, but inner wisdom, deep insight, prophecy, and the capacity for endless self-transformation.¹¹
So it appears that our biblical “origins” were not original at all.
Our Missing Mother displays no trace of insecurity. With her seasonal wisdom, she openly reveals the natural process of mature growth and development; with her wise serpent, she freely gifts self-transformation knowledge to us all. Her natural checks and balances connect us directly to reality, and her deep roots show us the need to peer beneath the surface. Her round earth generously nourishes us and unites us all. All of her eye-opening wisdom simply materialises in plain sight for us all to see and to savour. Being fundamentally real, timelessly true, and rooted in observable, natural processes, and organic, earthly reality, her-story has the real power to return us to our senses.
Which is precisely why the biblical fathers buried it so long ago.
Now that we’ve recovered some of that forbidden inner in-sight, it is time to continue on our epic biblical journey today. Let us now fast forward to the Genesis myth together, to peer deeper into the doctrine of “Original Sin” and see what we uncover...
Unearthing the Real Origin of Sin
“The widespread conception of the ‘Supreme Being’ as an entity distinct from this world but controlling it according to plan and keeping human beings in a state of infantile subjection has been a not too subtle mask of the divine patriarch.” — Mary Daly
[3:17] …“Because you have…eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
Within the Genesis myth, humans are portrayed as innately sinful for disobeying Father God’s forbidden fruit mandate and are ordered to spend the entirety of their lives in indentured toil for their primordially “evil” act. This doctrine of original sin alleges basic human inferiority, through powerful “shame-dumping” that still burdens us to this day, and therefore requires a deeper look at what lies beneath its guilt-inducing declaration. In order to do so, we must once again re-turn to the revealing, ancient language of symbolism, which allows us to peer underneath the surface of this doctrine and unearth its real messages and deeper motivations.
In metaphorical terms, to forbid contact with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil means to prohibit us from ever being able to see for ourselves when exploitive “evil” masquerades around as counterfeit “good,” and therefore to forever remain naively cut-off from Mother Earth’s wise, wildish, and instinctive Predator-Spotting-Knowledge for the entirety of our earthly lives. This biblical condemnation against inner, eye-opening (and often life-saving) Wolf-in-Sheep’s-Clothing-Wisdom, along with Father God’s initial empty death threats and eventual brutal punishment for our “original sin,” reveals a controlling intention and underlying power motivation within this doctrine, dishonestly cloaking away truly dangerous dictates underneath a superficial facade of fatherly “concern.”
Another way of putting it is that Power masquerading around as Love is evil,¹² as anyone who has been involved in romantic relationship with a love-bombing narcissist knows only too well. In fact, moving forward I will use the symbol “False Father” as an allegorical depiction of The Deadly Sin of Man-Made Religion, with its egoistic Power-Over-Other ideology that begets endless evil, by diabolically mis-locating evil in the Other,¹³ “divinely” justifying its own oppressive power structures, then denying, blame-shifting, gaslighting, shame-dumping, and projecting onto “Other” in order to cover it all up — like some sort of nightmare, collect-them-all frenzy for Freudian defence mechanisms! Opening our eyes to this real original sin allows us to cast off the burden of guilt that we have all been forced to carry and to return the label “evil sinner” to its real and eminently blameworthy genesis — reclaiming the genuine in-sight to truly save our own souls, by simply ejecting from this millenia-long, epic biblical hoax forever.
With our foundational overview of the Genesis myth now established, I would like to invite you on a journey of further exploration — to see and to hear how False Father still hides away inside of our relationships, our work culture, our emotions, and our Mother Earth, and still plagues our souls with his sneakily replicating, modern cult-tural adaptations.
So are you curious to adventure further into this epic biblical story with me?
Before you answer that question — and just to reassure you — you are in for a real happy ending.
If your answer is yes, then take a deep breath and read on…
False Father in Modern Life
“Many people have rejected the “revealed truth” of Christianity without ever questioning the underlying concept that truth is a set of beliefs revealed through the agency of a “Great Man”…truth is always seen as coming from someone else, as only knowable secondhand.” — Starhawk
[2:16] And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; [2:17] but of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Concealed within the Genesis command to never taste the fruit of real knowledge for oneself — and therefore to never pass through the ancient initiation rite of symbolic death to childhood dependency and symbolic rebirth into adult autonomy — hides the inner power dismantling curse of heteronomy: “Subjection to something else; a lack of moral freedom or self-determination.” Within this biblical blight, one can live a seemingly non-religious life, yet still remain afflicted with the much sneakier and psychologically-invasive scourge of heteronomy.
By forbidding the fruit of inner knowledge, False Father enforces strict, childlike subjection, preventing us from having real adult autonomy for ourselves, or from even knowing that this option exists. In the irreplaceable place of genuine autonomy, False Father sells us a falsehood — that we should blindly subject ourselves to paternalistic “outer guidance,” “outer experts,” or “outer saving others” for the entirety of our adult lives. False Father commands us to remain “innocent” to his fruitless myth of The Outer Authority, relegating us to a lifetime of heteronomy, in a profoundly artificial and disempowering search for someone “out there” to guide us and show us the way.
The biblical plague of heteronomy takes the modern, seemingly non-religious form of all outer “others” that we idealise, obey, or exclusively validate ourselves through and all forms of following behavior, people-pleasing, and emotional co-dependency that continues well into adulthood. It also hides itself away in the surreptitious forms of “expert advice,” “peer-reviewed journals,” “feedback forms,” and other supposedly “helpful” manifestations of paternalistic oversight, that subtly serve to reinforce the delusion that a legitimizing authority is even necessary in the first place, instructing our childlike sheep-souls — from the outside and from up above — whether something is “good” or not.
If your initial thought was something along the lines of: “But the world would descend into chaos without Daddy!” Well firstly, the world has already descended into chaos¹⁴ with Daddy. Secondly, you just tested positive for heterono-virus. And if you are interested in knowing how to permanently purge yourself of this biblical pestilence, then take another deep breath and read on.
False Father and Modern Work Cult-ture
Biblical heteronomy can also afflict us to dutifully follow a path in life that was laid out by parental or societal expectations:
[2:5] …there was no one to till the ground; [2:15] The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
According to the Genesis myth, heteronomy should continue for the totality of our adult lives; the very human lives that we are also meant to till away in unquestioning service to his industrial monoculture. And while we laboriously throw away presence in our own precious earthly lives — in the breathless haste and waste of frantic busyness and life-energy-extraction — we also get to numb ourselves with an array of addictive toxins created by his billionaire-boy-minions, in order to keep the mechanical gears of his artificial hustle cult-ture grinding along, and in order to distract us just enough to leave us none the wiser about it.
[2:18] Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”
False Father also plagues our modern lives whenever the word “help” is misused to describe self-sacrifice and subjection.¹⁵ This biblical pestilence naturally shows up at the office, with dishonestly worded requests for additional, unpaid labor in the form of: “help out,” “muck-in,” and “be a team player.” Right on biblical-scapegoat cue, this plague disproportionately infects women, with recent research showing it will take over one hundred and thirty years to close the gender pay gap, and with additional new research showing this entitlement to female servitude shows up in the childhood household, blighting women from day one to unknowingly succumb to the heterono-virus scourge.
False Father and Modern Consumer Cult-ture
Biblical heteronomy can also invade our minds and direct our behaviours, to dutifully serve its own diabolical ends with parasitic precision:
[1:26] Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image…and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
According to False Father’s next false commandment that we are meant to obediently buy into and consume, whilst toiling away presence in our own precious, earthly lives, we are divinely ordained to buy into the endless consumption of Mother Earth-destroying, disposable, unfulfilling material crap, that we are also meant to obediently and mindlessly consume, before we are then supposed to obediently and mindlessly throw it all away. We are literally meant to keep throwing everything away while we mindlessly wait for his paradisiacal after-life in the sky — a paradise that is, of course, as far away from the ground of perennially hated, Mother Earth’s reality as biblically possible.
False Father’s commandment to dominate nature also infects us inside of our very own souls on a symbolic level, hiding itself away in the seemingly modern myth of “distanced objectivity,”¹⁶ that commands us to control our own inner nature. This sense-numbing non-sense alienates us from our warning senses — i.e., our instincts, gut feelings, intuitions, emotions, and bodily intelligences — by sneakily mislabeling them irrational, inferior, dirty, weak, evil, or effeminate. This “modern” commandment also detaches us from the ground of our own reality, traps us in a disorienting cloud of mental confusion, blindfolds us into easy prey, and opens us up to mind-predation by those same-old “Outer Authorities” meant to “guide” us. And they do happily guide us — directly to the cash registers of Father’s Inc. — where we are then “sold” the myth that we can fill our existential emptiness by accumulating more worthless crap, trapping us right back in False Father’s artificial cycle of fruitless repetition, and right back in biblical heteronomy, exactly where we supposedly “belong.” It seems that his-story really does endlessly repeat itself, and there truly is nothing new under the son.
So, have you heard enough of False Father’s artificial commandments by about now?
As I am sure you can clearly see, the time has come for us all to return to our senses. And although this biblical trap might seem inescapable, just a reminder that there is real hope and a happy ending awaiting us. In an ironically delightful plot-twist, False Father’s own myth shows us exactly how to leave artificial life behind us and that this genuine power resides within our very own hands…
So with Mother Earth’s cyclical wisdom and our own reclaimed inner in-sight to guide us, let us now embark on our permanent exodus together, and take a giant leap forward united, to return back to reality forever.
Our Journey Back to the Future
“What is behind the visible?…if there is a secret something…if there is a forbidden something, it needs to be looked into. Those who would develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
[3:6] So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food…and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband…and he ate. [3:7] Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Despite False Father’s modern cult-tural adaptations, but precisely because he is the man-made man-ifestation of constructed artificiality par excellence, his own myth predicts that his falsehoods will not be powerful enough to topple Mother Earth’s natural truth in the end and that his man-made lies will not hold up against genuine reality.
False Father’s own myth helpfully spells out in symbolic form the mechanisms of its own demise and reveals the precise details of how to subvert its own fallacious narrative: by simply opening one’s own eyes through “evil” inner insight into the whole demonically false narrative itself and by ejecting oneself from blind participation in the entire thing. It shows the way out of caged artificiality into liberated reality comes through reaching out for the forbidden fruit of real inner knowledge, by waking up to the revealing fact that you had been stripped naked of your own choice, and by taking the self-directed decision to finally disobey.
With an unwitting prediction of hope for the future, False Father’s myth prophecies that his gaslighting will not prevent Mother Earth’s children from hearing their own inner calling; from listening to the guiding voice of their own instincts; from bravely responding to their own inner wisdom; from boldly letting their own truth set them free; from hearing their inner voice whisper: ‘There’s more to life than this;” telling them to: “Go find real knowledge for themselves;” encouraging them to take that leap into the unknown, and giving them the courage to just simply walk-out on False Father’s artificial monoculture garden of lies.
When we choose to slow-down and turn inwards, only then can we return to our senses, with the reclaimed ability to smell a rat, shrewdly sniffing out and seeing through both the historic and modern manifestations of manipulation, gaslighting, artificiality, and lies. And with this natural connection to inner in-sight restored, we can open our eyes to all of the False Fathers’ egoistic destructions, and we can freely opt-out of their king-dom, quite simply by refusing to support them.
In an unexpected happy-ending plot twist, False Father does show us the way to truth in the end. He reveals that by simply opening our eyes to reality, we can walk straight out of his whole trap.
Post-Exodus: A Brave New World Awaits
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” — bell hooks
When we do finally opt-out of False Father’s king-dom of mental, physical, and earthly domination; when we stop taking in his projected self-hatred for his original sin that we’ve been forced to internalise to our own demise; when we see through his destructive “divide-and-conquer” tactics that manipulate us into pointing fingers at each other rather than directly at his systems of collective oppression where the blame truly belongs; when we realise our shared Mother Earth has been desacralized, scapegoated, and banished from this man-made, man-ufactured image of “divinity” for thousands of years to cover up the fact that False Father blatantly ripped-off her religion; when we come together in our shared in-sights through the real fruits of inner knowledge and through the genuine, healing power of human connection and community, we can eject from the artificial, mechanical, life-destroying matrix together, to free our minds and bodies, to re-wild our souls, and to heal ourselves, each other, our fellow creatures, and our Mother Earth. And with this brave act we can paradoxically free False Father too.
Our collective self-removal from the pseudo-paradisiacal, imperialist, materialist, consumerist crib-cage of artificial life can ultimately free False Father to go fly off on his very own billionaire-boys-club-manufactured mechanical metal phallus into outer space all alone, to colonize other planets with his toxic, invasive ideology as he wishes, all by his lonesome. False Father will be free to cosmically transcend his jealously hated Mother Earth in the ultimate gas-powered projection of hot air — to fulfill his boyish dream of getting as far away from her as possible — where he can finally be free to go f*ck himself for good.
The End.
References
[1] von Franz, Marie Louise, Creation Myths, (Spring Publications, 1972)
[2] White, Lynn Jr., ‘The Historical Roots Of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 155.3767 (1967), 1203–1207; see also: Curry, Patrick, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011)
[3] Weinhold, Barry K, and Weinhold, Janae B., How To Break Free Of The Drama Triangle And Victim Consciousness, (Create Space Publishing, 2014)
[4] Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology: The Masks Of God, Volume 1, (Novato: New World Library, 2021)
[5] Nixey, Catherine, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction Of The Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017)
[6] Walker, Barbara G., The Woman’s Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets, (Harper Collins, 1983); see also: Stone, Merlin, When God Was A Woman, (Harcourt Inc., 1976)
[7] Gimbutas, Marija, The Living Goddess, ed. by Miriam Robbins Dexter (University of California Press, 2001)
[8] Shuttle, Penelope and Redgrove, Peter, The Wise Wound, (Marion Boyars, 2015)
[9] Estes, Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting The Power Of The Wild Woman, (Rider: 2008)
[10] Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A Study In Magic And Religion, (Oxford University Press, 1998)
[11] Mor, Barbara and Sjoo, Monica, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion Of The Earth, 2nd edn. (Harper & Row, 1987)
[12] Jung, Carl, Collected Works Volume 7: Two Essays In Analytical Psychology, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)
[13] Daly, Mary, Beyond God The Father: Toward A Philosophy Of Women’s Liberation, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973)
[14] Bendell, Jem, ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map For Navigating Climate Tragedy’, IFLAS, 2nd edn. (2020)
[15] Conversation with Delia Suciu, Tuscany, Italy (June 5, 2022)
[16] Plumwood, Val, ‘Gender, Eco-Feminism And The Environment’, in Controversies In Environmental Sociology, ed. by Rob White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 55–72
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